TriPoint, a Union Alliance novel by Caroline J. Cherryh

She’d been thinking about Tom, on that ship. Asking herself if Bowe would go so far as harming Tom. Asking herself if she cared, except in so far as she hated like hell Bowe getting any point against her.

Didn’t know if that was a normal way to feel. Damned sure not the way the ballads and the books had it. Not the soppy way the child-besotted declared they felt it. If there was mother-love then there was a shadow-side of that instinct, a dark side the ballads and the books also had: the imperative to give birth and the imperative to destroy the life, in the wrong season, the ill season, the winter, the drought, the feud, the war—she’d studied the question, read prehistory and psych and civ. And understood what she’d done when she’d kept Bowe’s offering inside herself, and sometime rejected it and sometime tried to deal with it until it became a him, then Tom, and lastly, God help her and him, poor, damned, disaster-bound fool.

She’d mistrusted instinct. Mistrusted it and alternately ridden it in violent reverses of personal direction throughout her life. This time she was following it, from moment to moment scared to death, and from moment to moment wildly willing to take the risk, life or death, win or lose.

Getting Tom back… she wasn’t so sure. She wasn’t so sure she wanted back anyone who’d had to do with Bowe.

Unless Tom took up her cause and settled accounts himself, which, on the one hand, she’d wanted once, and then felt differently—because it wouldn’t be her doing. Because Tom wasn’t, as she’d thought once, simply her doing. Tom belonged to Tom, and you couldn’t ever quite predict what he’d do.

What he’d do would probably be stupid.

No, foolish. Tom wasn’t stupid. Ignorant. And ignorant people trusted people, or assumed they knew. She knew how to see through the illusions of human behavior, but Tom didn’t. He’d proved that, persisting in a kind of loyalty to her, blind, gut-level, helpless. She’d tried to reason with it, kill it, drive it out of his head, but he could never see she didn’t have what he was looking for. He couldn’t understand the impulse she had when he screamed his baby screams to fling him out of her arms and against the wall, he couldn’t understand the violence she felt when he looked at her and said, Marie, why? or Marie, why not? and he wouldn’t take the answers when she gave them. She’d taken him home and stood the questions and the demands as long as she could and she always took him back to the kids’ loft when she started wanting to hurt him, when she started to dream at night and fantasize by day about doing terrible, cruel things to him. The Family couldn’t stop her. If she chopped him in small pieces, the Family wouldn’t do anything: she was too important to the ship. The Family wouldn’t do anything but keep the other kids out of her path, and that suited her fine, she hated kids, hated their noise and disorder.

Most of all she despised Tom, when he looked at her in stupid, hateful need, expecting her to give him what she’d gone out on Mariner dock looking for in her own blind juvenile instinct, the expectation of affection Bowe had betrayed and Mischa had, because nobody cared.

So now the kid wanted her to validate the worst lie she’d ever learned the truth of? The kid wanted to run the cycle all over again, and she wanted to kill him or detach him or beat the expectation out of his eyes—the way she wanted to kill him now for being where he was, and for changing the equation that was her and Bowe… Tom couldn’t stay out of her life, one thought ran, couldn’t stop screwing things up, and making what should be simple into a muddled, fucked-up mess; and meanwhile another thought ran, He didn’t deserve having happen to him what had happened to her, didn’t deserve where Bowe could send him, onto some damned Fleet dark-runner—the initiation stupid kids got into the Fleet was what she’d gotten at Mariner, what she’d learned too late to save herself. She’d known then what Bowe was and understood the fuck-you gesture he’d made at Sprite even when he’d turned her back to them, all full of violence, full of hate… she was a bottle full of demons, the sort of demons that existed in everyone, but Bowe had let her meet his, and she’d waked her own, that was the way she imaged it. The whole universe went ignorant of their own demons and denied they had them. But she knew. And Bowe knew. They’d been intimate with them for forty-eight hours.

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